Topsy-Turvy
by TheFicChick
Summary: "I just…these could be the last three minutes, you know? Like, the last three minutes before…things are different."
1. Chapter 1

**Topsy-Turvy**

**Rating: **M.

**Summary: **"I just…these could be the last three minutes, you know? Like, the last three minutes before…things are different."

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_**Author's Note:**__ Okay, this is unbeta'ed, because it's just something fun I was kicking around. But on a less fun note, my wonderful friend and beta, HollettLA, is searching for her cat, Mully, who went missing in the Northern Virginia area yesterday (4/30/13). If you are in that area, please keep an eye out, and if you have any info, please PM me. For photos of Mully or more information on where he went missing, come find me on Twitter (TheFicChick). Thanks in advance. xo_

* * *

The _Star Wars_ theme is emanating from somewhere beside my bed. My hand stills in my boxers and I contemplate the situation at hand: finish what I'm doing and let the call go to voicemail or postpone my typical Friday night pastime in favor of potential human interaction. I give a few more pulls, but the song plays on, forcing the imagined images of various girl-parts from my brain and the motivation from my fingers.

Another refrain and I slide my hand out of my shorts, rolling to one side and rummaging around in the mess on my bedroom floor: back issues of _Game Informer_, dirty socks, empty water and soda bottles, a half-eaten bag of Doritos, a squished Snickers bar, my AP physics textbook, my copy of _A Farewell to Arms_ for English. Finally unearthing my phone, I see the number of the store displayed on the screen.

"Hello?"

"Edward?" It's Gemma, and she sounds like hell.

"Yeah?"

"Edward, I'm so sorry to bother you on a Friday night. Have I dragged you away from something fun?"

Reflexively, I glance down at my lap; my "fun" is deflating. "No," I half-lie. "Not at all. Everything okay?"

"I'm supposed to be closing, but I feel awful. I tried to get in touch with Roger but he's not answering his phone, and I don't want to close up too early." I don't blame her; Roger's a bastard when someone dares to do anything without his approval. No doubt he would read Gemma the riot act if she closed up even two hours early, despite the fact that the Forks Pharmacy isn't exactly a Friday night hot spot. "I hate to ruin your evening, but is there any way you could come in and cover the end of my shift?"

That Gemma thinks I might have plans on a Friday night – plans that involve something more than whacking off in my own empty house – is adorable. Misguided, but adorable. "Of course I can," I tell her, and her exhale of relief is audible through the phone line. "I'll be there in ten minutes, okay?"

"Oh, thank you, Edward," she breathes. "Thank you _so_ much."

As we disconnect, I sigh and rise from the bed, grabbing my jeans from the back of my desk chair and sniffing the armpits of my t-shirt. Not terrible, but not great, either. I grab a clean one from the middle drawer of my dresser and replace the one I've been wearing all day. Glancing around the room, I don't see the god-awful red vest that is part of the "uniform" required by my employer. I rummage through the pile of clothes in the corner to no avail before it occurs to me that my mother might have snagged it and washed it. As I move to leave the room, though, I spy a flash of red as I pass the closet; there, hanging in all its polyester glory, is the vest. As I grab it from the hanger, a waft of detergent hits me, and I laugh as I shake my head.

_Moms._

* * *

When I arrive at the pharmacy ten minutes later, it's to find Gemma draped dramatically over the counter beside the register, her complexion decidedly green. "Hey," I say as I shuffle in, red polyester vest balled in my left hand. I may not be the most stylish of dressers, but I patently refuse to put that thing on until I'm actually standing behind the counter and therefore have no other option.

"_Thank_ you," she breathes. "Thank you _so_ much, Edward. I'm _so_ sorry to drag you out." She's pushing a limp strand of hair off her sweat-dampened forehead; whatever she has, it doesn't look fun. I take an involuntary step back. "No sweat," I tell her, tilting my head in the direction of the staff room. "Why don't you get out of here? Get some rest."

She nods, fingers undoing the line of buttons at the front of her own vest. "I'm happy to tell Roger to pay you for the whole shift," she says softly, dropping her eyes to the front of her garment. I'm reminded of Christmas, when she begged our boss to cut her a deal on the holiday candy so that she could fill her kids' Christmas stockings, and the day she had to plead with Roger for an advance on her paycheck because her son had outgrown his shoes and didn't have any to wear to school that didn't give him blisters.

"No way," I say immediately, pulling my own vest over my head so that I don't have to watch her fumble. "I wasn't doing anything, anyway. Don't worry about it."

Pulling the front of the vest down, I peek up at her; she has her head cocked to one side. "Good-looking kid like you? No plans on a Friday night?"

I blush, despite the fact that Gemma's technically old enough to be my mother. "Nope."

"Well, if I were ten years younger." Thankfully, she doesn't elaborate on what, exactly, she would do with me if she were, in fact, ten years younger. Instead, she lifts her chin toward the rear corner of the store. "Just one customer in here at the moment. It's been pretty slow."

I nod, winding my way behind the counter as Gemma turns to head for the staff room. "Okay."

"Chief Swan's kid," she tosses over her shoulder.

At that, I feel my eyebrows hike. "Bella?" But she doesn't answer, disappearing behind the farthest aisle – nail polish and lip gloss on the end display and an entire wall of other cosmetics I don't pretend to know what girls do with stretching out of view. I smooth my hands over the front of my vest and immediately shake my head at myself; there's nothing a few wrinkles can do to this thing to make it look any more lame. I glance down at my name tag; the bottom of the "E" and the top of the "d" are slightly peeled away, making it look like "Foward." I wish with a sudden, painful jolt that I hadn't opted to add a sticker of the TARDIS above my butchered name; as if anyone needs the reminder that I'm a grade-A, certified loser. Especially Bella.

I run my hands down over my torso once again, more out of habit than to actually rectify any wrinkling issues, and glance toward the back corner of the store where Gemma indicated. I straighten the boxes of Wrigley's gum and Altoids mints beside the register and return the dangling stylus to its holder alongside the credit card reader. The tape around the edges of the computer-printed sheet of paper reminding customers that they need a valid state-issued ID to pick up prescription medications is beginning to peel away, and I attempt unsuccessfully to re-stick it to the countertop. I can see that Gemma has drawn two cubes and a lightning bolt along the bottom corner of the paper; if Roger ever spent any time behind the counter, that shit would drive him nuts.

"Thank you again, Edward," I hear from the other side of the counter, and I look up to see Gemma's grateful face half-buried by the collar of her thick coat. She must have been feeling crappy before her shift even started; it's nearly eighty degrees out there even now.

"Feel better," I say, and she nods before shuffling out of the store, the tiny bell above the door jangling as she exits. I glance at the clock behind the counter and then back toward the far corner of the store. Why would Bella Swan be in the Forks Pharmacy at eight-thirty on a Friday night? Nobody spends Friday night in a pharmacy, especially not people like Bella. People like Bella spend it…well, doing something far more exciting. Probably going to the multiplex in Port Angeles. Or having one of those bonfire parties out at the reservation that I've never been to but heard plenty about. Or…something else a lot more fun than shopping for toiletries.

The store is eerily quiet, and if Gemma hadn't told me that there was someone in here, I'd have thought I was alone. Leaning over the register counter, I peek into the parking lot. My car is the only one out there, and I wonder why Bella's truck isn't in one of the spaces. Unless she parked at the diner and walked over – the diner's lot is behind the building, and I can't see to confirm or disprove the possibility. Then again, the Forks Diner is another spot I would never expect to find Bella Swan on a Friday night. Not these days.

Stepping out from behind the register, I peer down the far aisle, but it's deserted. Pretending to be checking inventory, I wander along the aisle, eyeing the rows of shampoo, conditioner, hair gel, hair mousse, hair cream, hair spray, and eighteen other types of hair products that I couldn't begin to say what purpose they serve. Rosalie is always eyeballing my hair, muttering about how a "little product would go a long way," but she's just lucky I wash it. Who wants to put shit in their hair only to have to wash it out a few hours later?

Well, except Mike Newton and all of his cronies. There's no shortage of "product" when it comes to those assholes. Maybe why they're such morons: the chemicals from their copious amounts of gel have seeped through the skin of their skulls and affected their brains.

There's a Sci-Fi movie in there somewhere.

I pause at the end of the aisle and make a point of rustling the display of headbands and hairbrushes so that, if Bella's on the opposite side of the shelf, my sudden appearance won't startle her. My on-purpose "rustling," however, turns into an involuntary knocking over of six bottles of discounted shampoo, and by the time I've put them to rights, I've likely alerted her to my presence regardless of what aisle she's in.

Peeking around the corner, I confirm that she's not in the market for deodorant, shave gel, or razors. A peek down the next aisle also shows no Bella, but I see that Roger's put the bodywash on sale; I'll have to remember to grab a bottle before the end of my shift. Passing the display, I catch movement out of the corner of my eye and spy Bella standing halfway down the next aisle, frowning at the shelf before her.

Quickly, I attempt to flatten my disobedient hair with one hand and my ridiculous employee vest with the other as I take a few steps toward her. She hasn't noticed my presence despite my rather noisy approach, and I take a fleeting moment to consider her in a way I never do at school. She's beautiful. Well, she's always been beautiful, ever since we were kids who lived next door to each other and she would hang upside down from the low branches of the pear tree between our houses, the ends of her long brown hair dragging through the grass.

"Come on, Edward," she would tease. "It's not scary."

I would eventually climb up onto the branch and carefully arrange my legs around it until I was dangling upside down right beside her. "See?" she would say, turning to face me, her face redder than normal from all of the blood rushing into it. "No big deal."

"No big deal," I would agree, even though I never much cared for the way the world looked when it was flipped upside down.

I should have taken it as an omen when Chief Swan chopped down that tree the summer we were twelve; when Bella moved across town the following year after her father got promoted to Chief of Police, she stopped looking at the world from a different angle with me. Instead, she started looking at it like other people expected her to, and she stopped looking at me altogether. In time, I stopped looking at her, too, even if it was purely out of self-preservation. After all, when Mike Newton slams you up against a locker and tells you he'll cut your balls off if he catches you ogling his girlfriend one more time, you take that shit to heart.

I may not have much use for my balls just yet, but I'd like to keep them all the same.

Still, Mike's not here right now, and I take a split second to enjoy the sight of her before opening my mouth. "Hey, Bella," I say in greeting, and her head whips around to stare at me, a sudden flush flooding her face. Immediately, I remember what she looked like hanging upside down beside me, pink-cheeked and grinning. Now, though, she's not smiling. In fact, she sort of looks like I caught her shoplifting. But that would be ridiculous, because not only is she the Chief of Police's daughter, she also has a conscience. Even if she doesn't generally acknowledge at me, at least Mike doesn't give me shit when she's around, and I know it has to do with the time she lit him up for doing just that when she was within earshot. Still, I glance toward the shelf she's standing in front of, and her sudden discomfiture hits me as I realize what aisle we're in.

B4.

_Feminine hygiene products._

_Family planning._

In more common vernacular: tampons and rubbers.

_Shit._

"Um, did you, uh, need help finding anything?" I stammer, feeling a familiar heat creep into my own face. _Fuck. Like I'll be any good if she asks me for help with tampons. Or condoms, for that matter._

"Um. No." She ducks her head. "Thanks. I'm good."

"Okay. Well, give a holler if you need anything."

I barely see her nod before I spin to make my escape and crash into a cardboard display of incontinence pads.

_I hate my life._

"Shit," I mutter, stuffing the purple and pink plastic sleeves back into the cardboard stand, which of course chooses this minute to fold in on itself. "Fuck," I mutter, shoving the entire contraption up against the shelving unit. "I'll just, um. Do that later." I glance to where Bella is standing wide-eyed, staring at the collapsed display, before bolting from the aisle.

_Smooth, jackass. Not that she didn't already know you were a total freaking spaz, but way to confirm it for her._

Good thing I work somewhere I can get a discount on cold compresses; I might need one for my astoundingly bruised ego. It isn't until I'm back in place behind the register, silently swearing at my less-than-suave self for that rather spectacular display of loserhood, that I realize that Bella wasn't quite far enough down the aisle to be buying tampons. Mike Newton's face floats through my mind and I feel indignation, righteous and bitter, rising within me. What kind of fucking asshole sends his girlfriend to the store to buy the condoms?

Answer: Mike Fucking Newton. King of the assholes.

Granted, I've never been in a position to need condoms, but even if I were, I can't imagine making that the girl's responsibility. I mean, she's doing you a favor by agreeing to sleep with you, right? The least you can do is come prepared.

I'm treated to the rather nauseating realization that this is further proof that Bella is, in fact, sleeping with that utter dickhead, and it makes me even sadder than when I first heard Mike bragging about it in the locker room before gym. Then, I could pretend he was lying, that it was the unfounded boasting of a guy wanting to impress his lemmings. But this, Bella buying rubbers, is pretty damning evidence that he wasn't bullshitting. I didn't think it was possible to hate him more than I already did until this moment. I cast about for something to at least give the appearance that I'm busy, but options are limited. As I reach for the all-purpose cleaner and the roll of paper towel that we keep beneath the counter, I catch movement from the corner of my eye.

"I, um. Didn't think you worked on Fridays," Bella says as she shuffles up to the front of the store, and I fight to keep the surprise from my face. _She knows when I work?_

"Yeah, I don't usually. I'm uh, filling in for Gemma."

"Oh." She shifts her weight and I peer down at her; she's looking down at her feet, and the part in her dark brown hair is crooked. She looks more disheveled than she does at school, and the possibility occurs to me that Mike actually sent her out mid-act to buy them. And my hatred grows.

"All set?" I ask finally, and she peers up at me, lips twitching. That tiny thing takes me back years, to when she was hedging and she would chew on the inside of her lower lip. I remember how the skin inside her mouth would be raw from where she'd damn near chewed it off, and how it was so much worse after her mom left.

"Yeah," she says, her voice tiny and soft, and I'm reminded of Roger's spiel that he gave me when he hired me a year and a half ago.

"_Don't bat an eye," he said. "People will come in to buy condoms, women will come in to buy women's things. Don't react to anything; just put it in the bag."_

I'm turning the mantra over in my head as Bella takes a step closer to the counter; when her hand comes into view and she places a small, rectangular box on top of the paper sign I'd been considering earlier, my heart leaps into my throat. Because in addition to condoms, there's another part of the "family planning" aisle I hadn't thought to consider.

Pregnancy tests.

_Shit._

Roger's warnings fly out of my head as my eyes snap to her face; once again, her cheeks are red and she's not meeting my eye. "Please don't," she whispers, and I'm frozen in place, my eyes on her face, my heart stuttering in my chest. "Don't say anything."

I nod and ring up the purchase, trying to act casual as I slide the box into the white plastic bag with the Forks Pharmacy logo on the side and glance at the register display. "Seven forty-nine," I say, and she pulls a twenty from the back pocket of her jeans. As I count out her change, I shoot for small talk. "I didn't see your truck in the lot." Bella's enormous red rust-bucket of a truck was the one thing I held onto when our paths diverged, the one indication that despite the new circle of friends and the dipshit boyfriend and the promotion to the higher Forks income bracket and subsequent escalation up the Forks High food chain, the girl with the skinned knees and flyaway hair was still in there somewhere. She'd been talking about buying that truck back when we were still friends and her dad's buddy would drive it over from the reservation; that she actually did it – probably to the amusement of Mike Newton and Lauren Mallory and all of the other Forks High white-collars – made me think there might still be hope for her, after all. It rarely appeared in the school parking lot, due to the fact that most days she arrived in the passenger seat of Mike's Mitsubishi Eclipse, but she bought it, and that had to count for something.

"My truck died, and I didn't want to ask Charlie to give me a ride for obvious reasons."

I nod. It's been a while since I had any reason to interact with Chief Swan, but I can't imagine that the possibility that his daughter is knocked up at seventeen would go over too well.

"What about Mike?" I ask, hoping the sneer that was in my mind when I said his name wasn't evident in my voice.

"Mike and I aren't—" She shakes her head. "We broke up."

_Well, shit._ "Oh," I say aloud, and while yesterday or the day before or any of the nearly two years' worth of days before that the news of a Mike-and-Bella breakup would have filled me with glee, right now my heart hurts. "I'm sorry," I say lamely, and she barks out a bitter laugh.

"Yeah. Me too." The anger in her voice makes me think she's not talking about the breakup, but it's been years since Bella told me what she was thinking, and I don't have the stones to ask her for clarification.

As much as I hate that she's going through this, as much as I want to fucking rip Mike Newton apart piece by piece – starting with the piece that got Bella into this mess – there's a tiny part of me that's relieved. Standing in this air-conditioned drug store with her hair a mess and her clothes rumpled and worn, dirty sneakers on her feet, Bella looks more like the girl I used to climb trees with than she has in years.

I hand over her change and pull the receipt from the roll. "Do you want your receipt in the bag?" I ask, and she stares at it for a moment as if this is decision with consequences.

"Um, you can just throw it away," she replies, and I nod as I crumple the tiny rectangle of paper in my fist and drop it into the small plastic trash can beneath the counter. I pull the bag from its metal hooks and pass it over the counter; as she takes it from me, I notice that her nails are bitten down to the quicks. I expect her to head for the door, but she's still standing before me, staring at the bag in her hands. "My father's going to kill me," she says finally, her voice heavy with regret. I remember how close she and Charlie were after Renee skipped town, and I wonder if that's changed in the years since. I wonder how the chief felt about Mike Newton, if he agreed with me that while Bella's a smart girl, her taste in guys is abysmal. "He doesn't even know I was…" She trails off, but it doesn't matter – if Charlie knew that Mike was nailing his daughter, I'd surely have heard a story about him cocking his service revolver in Newton's general direction. Suddenly, standing behind the register on higher ground than Bella's on feels all wrong, and I quickly round the counter and step down to stand beside her, reaching out under pretense of straightening the cardboard boxes of Snickers and Milky Way bars in front of the register.

"Maybe you're not," I offer, even though we're approaching the edge of what I'm comfortable discussing with a girl. "Pregnant, I mean."

Bella looks up and gazes at me steadily. "I'm five days late," she says in challenge, and I shift my weight as I let my hands fall to my sides. _Yep, that's the limit. Girls and their…stuff._

"Oh," I offer, at a loss to give her anything more. With the exception of health class, my only experience with that "stuff" was yelling at Rosalie when she'd leave her girly shit out in the bathroom we shared. I mean, a guy uses that space, too – the least she could do was stash that shit in a drawer or something. How'd she like it if I left my lotion and Kleenex out on the counter for the sake of convenience?

"Yeah, oh," Bella replies, bringing me back to the present moment. She's staring at the bag once again, the two-pack of ClearBlue digital pregnancy tests visible through the flimsy white plastic. We stand side by side in silence for a few breaths, and the parallel doesn't escape me: the world has flipped upside down, and Bella is beside me again. Even though, in this moment, I'm pretty sure that while I'm thrilled by the simple fact of her company, she'd rather be anywhere else. "Edward?"

"Yeah?"

"Do you think I could…use your bathroom?" My eyes fly to her face, and I have no doubt my surprise is visible. She flushes and looks back down. "I just…you're the only person I've told. It'd be nice to have someone to…wait with." Her nose wrinkles as if she's just thought of something particularly unpleasant. "And if Charlie finds the box or something, I'm screwed."

I bite my tongue against the retort that, given the evidence at hand, the screwing part of the program is decidedly in the past. "Sure," I say instead, even as the idea of sitting beside Bella at such a crucial moment is terrifying. "Of course," I add for good measure. "It's in the back. I can show you…" I trail off, tilting my head toward the staff room, but her eyebrows knit themselves together in a small frown.

"Oh. Um. Actually." She fishes out the ten-dollar bill from the change I've just given her. "I, um. Should buy something to drink first." She flushes slightly, and I'm confused for a beat until I clue in to the obvious: she has to pee on the stick.

"Right," I say quickly, turning and heading for the cooler on the wall perpendicular to the cosmetics. "We have all the Coke products – Coke, Diet, Sprite, Dr. Pepper, Mello Yello, Nestea – and all the Powerades, or Dasani…" I trail off, both because she has eyes and can therefore see exactly what her beverage options are, and because when the fuck did I become a waiter?

"Just a bottle of water would be great," she says, and I grab a bottle of Dasani for her and a Dr. Pepper for myself. As the door to the cooler swings shut with an audible suck, I hold the bottle of water out toward her. She extends the crumpled bill, but I shake my head.

"I get a discount," I offer lamely, immediately embarrassed by my attempt at casual and the barely-there amusement evident in the faint curl of her mouth.

_The first time I bought a girl a drink – didn't quite go as I'd imagined._

"Thanks," she says simply, and I nod as I make my way back toward the register. Instead of slipping behind it, I sink to the floor in front of it and uncap my soda, stretching my legs out in front of me on the ugly checkered industrial carpet and leaning back against the front of the counter. Bella eyes me for a minute before following my lead and sinking down beside me, stretching her legs out and placing the bagged pregnancy test on the floor between us.

After a few minutes of uncomfortable silence, I peek over at her. Her lips are wrapped around the mouth of the bottle and her eyes are staring at the display across from us: sand toys and sunblock and cheap plastic flip-flops. "So…Mike doesn't know?"

She shakes her head. "Mike doesn't know," she confirms, and her eyes darken slightly.

I hope I'm not reading her wrong, but fuck it if I am: sometimes shit just needs to be said. "He's an asshole," I offer, and she barks out a sardonic laugh.

"Where were you with that insight two years ago?" she asks with a sigh.

"You stopped listening to me long before two years ago." The words are out before I can swallow them, and I feel my own eyebrows shoot upward in a mirror image of what hers do. Evidently, sitting beside her staring at a world gone topsy-turvy has lured me into a false sense of familiarity. I cringe, awaiting the backlash, but it doesn't come.

"Yeah. Why did I do that?"

"I don't know," I reply, and I'm immediately embarrassed by the hurt in my voice. I'm remembering the first day of eighth grade and sitting at a lunch table by myself, and the three weeks I spent doing that very same thing until Jasper Whitlock arrived in Forks with his cowboy boots and southern accent and love of _Dungeons & Dragons_ and took the seat beside me, saving me from an entire year – and an entire high school career – of lunchtime ostracism. I remember staring across the cafeteria, long before Mike Newton warned me against it, seeing her laughing with Lauren and Jessica and Alice and wondering what the hell I'd done to make her stop being my friend.

She must hear the hurt because she turns to stare at me. "I'm really sorry, Edward. I'm sorry I did that."

I nod. I should probably say something flippant and dismissive, like, "_It's no big deal_," or "_Don't worry about it_," but I can't force the words to my lips. I've never been a very good liar. "Me too," I say finally, and Bella's big brown eyes are sadder than they have been all night.

"God, I'm really, _really_ sorry I did that."

I nod again, and despite my discomfort, I feel as though I've cut one of the lead weights that have kept me from flying. "Why did you?" I ask, crossing my legs and picking at the rubber label at the back of my sneakers. It's just starting to come away from the sole, and I've been messing with it for weeks.

"I don't know," she says finally, and from the corner of my eye I can see her watching my hand. "I just…Lauren was really nice to me all of a sudden, and I never had girl friends before. And I knew you didn't like her, so I was embarrassed and I stopped telling you stuff and started telling her stuff. And then Mike came along, and…" She pauses and begins fiddling with her shoelaces. "I knew you hated him. You'd always hated him. But he seemed so nice, in the beginning. I thought maybe you were wrong about him. And then I thought I was in love with him, you know?"

I shrug, because I don't. The closest I've ever been to thinking I was in love with someone was years ago, and what do eleven-year-olds know about love, anyway? Thinking someone's got really pretty eyes and liking the way her lips turn sort-of-purple after eating a red, white, and blue turbo rocket popsicle and thinking she's a hell of a wall-ball player aren't exactly the stuff of Shakespearean sonnets.

Suddenly, she seems embarrassed. "Well, anyway." She takes another sip of her water and turns the cap between her thumb and forefinger like a wheel. "I'm sorry, Edward."

"Thanks," I say finally, and she squints up at me for a moment, those brown eyes bruised and serious, before nodding and looking away. Abandoning my sneaker, I start picking at the label on my soda bottle. Bella glances at my hand and I think I hear her giggle before she glances away; when I look over, her cheeks are faintly pink.

"What?"

"Nothing," she replies quickly, shaking her head.

"Seriously, what?" She shakes her head again, and I feel a not-entirely-unfamiliar thread of irritation weave its way through me. "Yeah, because I don't get enough people laughing at me on a daily basis already. Thanks."

Surprise chases the amusement from her face, and as Bella stares at me, I feel a shaming mix of embarrassment and guilt gnaw at me. The last thing a knocked-up, single seventeen-year-old needs is my dumping a guilt trip on her. "Sorry," I mumble, picking at the label once again, and from the corner of my eye I see her shift on the carpet.

"No, I just…the label thing."

I frown as I look over at her, utterly clueless as to what she's talking about. "Label thing?"

She dips her head in the direction of the bottle in my lap. "Peeling the label. It's, um. Supposedly a sign of sexual frustration."

"Oh," I say, still peeling until the implication of her words settles in. "Oh!" I snatch my hand away from the label and feel heat suffuse my face. "Um."

Bella's looking at me intently, and I can't remember the last time I was in the spotlight of her attention like this. Any other time I'd likely be thrilled, but the context of our conversation only makes me want to bolt. Finally, determined to at least shoot for cool even if I land, as usual, among the losers, I shrug. "I'm seventeen and single. Isn't horny sort of a universal condition?"

Her eyes fly to my mine, and even with years between our friendship and now, I can't miss the relief and gratitude that sweep across her face, mingled with a healthy dash of surprise. Finally, as the silence approaches awkward, she smiles. "Yeah. I guess it is. Well, I'm newly single, so welcome me to your ranks."

I hold up my Dr. Pepper in salute, and she clinks her water bottle with it. "To the self-lovers," I toast, and her cheeks pink. Realizing what I've admitted, I feel my face do the same thing, and I take a generous swig of soda. We lapse back into silence, Bella taking measured sips of her water as I gulp my Dr. Pepper, wanting to get to the end of it before the bite of the carbonation diminishes. Half-flat Dr. Pepper just sucks, and I've never understood why it goes flat so quickly.

"So how come you don't date?" she asks carefully, and I opt not to comment on the fact that now she's the one picking absently at the Dasani label.

"Dating implies two willing participants," I reply. "I'm missing half the equation."

She peeks over at me. "Angela Weber wasn't a willing participant?"

My mind darts momentarily back to the handful of relatively awkward dates I went on with the minister's daughter last semester. If there's anyone nearly as intimidating for a teenage boy as a cop father, it's a minister father. I shrug. "She was. We just…weren't that compatible." I opt not to clarify; I doubt Bella would find Angela's lack of appreciation for "Dr. Who" and general distaste for _Harry Potter_ as valid grounds for dismissal. She did let me get my hand up her shirt – over the bra – but when we stopped making out and started talking, it was pretty clear that it wasn't meant to be.

"She's nice," Bella says, and I nod.

"She is," I reply, but my mind is still in the backseat of my decrepit Volvo station wagon with Angela's small, lace-clad breasts in my palms, and I can feel my unsatisfied boner from earlier making an ill-timed reappearance. Bella clears her throat, the sound oddly reminiscent of a moan, and the semi in my jeans is a full-on. I lurch upward, turning away from her and gulping the last of my soda before circling the counter and dumping the bottle in the trash can behind it. Normally I'd save it and recycle it, but I figure my dignity is worth five cents' worth of recyclable plastic.

I hear the sound of Bella grabbing the plastic bag and moving to stand before she reappears in the space before me. "Sorry," she says, embarrassed. "I didn't mean to be…nosy."

I shake my head, grateful for the counter between us but all too aware of the fact that my height means that my fly is only just hidden. Silently, I will the situation in my jeans to calm itself. "It's cool," I say, even though I myself am anything but. She takes another measured sip of her water, and I look away; can she just finish the fucking thing off before she finishes _me_ off? But she lowers the bottle again, and the thing's damn near half full.

"Okay," she says simply. I busy myself turning to a blank page in the binder of signatures where customers have signed for their prescription meds, capping the pen and sliding it through the three binder rings as my hard-on mercifully wanes. "My father's seriously going to kill me," she says again, and while any girl would likely be freaked out about that exact scenario, I know how much Bella loves her dad. The looming possibility that she's going to disappoint him in a pretty huge way is clearly bugging her. "He never much cared for Mike," she adds after a moment, and I feel the tiniest hint of smug satisfaction at this admission. Then I remember that Mike has kissed, touched, slept with Bella and potentially knocked her up, and the brief spark of amusement is extinguished.

"Yeah," is all I can think to say, and I remember my mother's attempt at the safe sex talk with me when I was thirteen, after my father was long gone.

"_Make sure that, when the time comes, you make good decisions, Edward," _I can remember her saying. _"It's okay to be in love with someone, and it's okay to express that love, but it's important that you do it in a responsible way. You owe that to yourself and your future, and you owe it to the future of the woman you love, too."_

Typical of my mother, really, to present it in that way – to take the taboo out of it entirely. It also wasn't lost on me that she chose the word "woman" instead of "girl," subtly implying that such a decision should be in my distant future. As if the near future were even an option, given my already-obvious tendency toward geekhood and single loserdom.

Fleetingly, I imagine being responsible for Bella's future, imagine sharing that with her, and a familiar pang of hurt mixed with longing jabs me in the ribs. Somehow, it was easier to push the ache of yearning aside when I didn't look at her. Now that I have, now that I see hints of the tree-climbing girl in the almost-woman beside me, it's considerably less simple.

I notice all of the things I remember: those dark brown eyes, the hair that, if we were standing in the sun, I know would have faint traces of red mixed in with the brown. The smattering of pale freckles across the bridge of her nose and the slightly bucked front teeth.

But then there are new things, and they're all of the things that I spent the past two years purposely _not_ noticing. Most of them, of course, are curves: the curve where her neck becomes shoulder, the curve where calves become ankles, the curve where chest becomes stomach and then the one where stomach becomes hips. The curve between lower lip and chin and the one between elbow and bicep. In the years I spent not looking, Bella got all of these _curves_, and right now I can't not see them.

I also can't not see the way she nurses that bottle, which gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "water torture." Tearing my eyes away, I emerge once again from behind the register and drag two of the on-sale folding canvas beach chairs from the cardboard box near the far end of the counter, opening them on the square of carpet where we were just sitting. Gesturing toward the red one, I sink into the blue, and Bella smiles faintly as she follows my cue, stashing her water in the cup holder cut into the fabric on the chair's armrest.

"I've missed you," she says softly, dragging me back to the conversation. She stretches her feet out in front of her again, tapping the white toes of her Converse sneakers together. I'm oddly mesmerized by the stretch of bare skin between the tops of her shoes and the cuffs of her jeans, which are folded just above her ankle.

"I never went anywhere, Bella."

"I know. I just…in the beginning, I convinced myself you wouldn't understand why I wanted another friend. And then so much time passed that I felt like, if I tried to fix things, you would just be mad at me. And then I was too much of a coward to apologize."

I turn this over in my mind for a few minutes. Finally, I force myself to look at her. "I might not have understood, but it probably would have hurt less than wondering what I did wrong."

"I'm sorry," she says again, and I feel another weight disappear. It's funny how often people say that apologies are just words, that "I'm sorry" isn't enough, and maybe I'm just a stupid kid who doesn't know anything, but in this moment, I feel like Bella's quiet "I'm sorry" has bandaged a wound I've been walking around with for years.

"Thanks," I say finally, and she nods. Grabs her water and takes another sip.

"My dad always asked about you. How you were doing and stuff. I think he wondered why you never came over or anything."

"I like your dad," I say, and I do. Even if the fact that he carries a gun intimidates the piss out of me, I still think that Chief Swan is a really nice guy. I always wished, as a kid, that my father had been less of a deadbeat asshole and more like Bella's dad.

"How's your mom?" she asks, picking determinedly at the chipped remnants of dark purple polish on her bitten-down nails.

"Good," I reply. "She's, uh, actually got a boyfriend."

Bella's surprised eyes look up. "Get out! Who?"

"Dr. Cullen."

Her eyes widen further. "Dr. Cullen? Like, _Carlisle_ Cullen?" Off my nod, she sighs. "God, he's so hot. Go, Esme."

I make a face, even though I have to admit that Carlisle is a step up from Mike Newton, so perhaps there's hope for Bella's taste in men after all. "Yeah. He's, uh, pretty cool. My mom really likes him."

"Do you think they'll get married?"

I shrug. "Maybe." Secretly, I hope so. With Rosalie happily entrenched in life and college on the opposite side of the country and me – God willing – going to college somewhere far, far away from Forks next fall, I hate the idea of my mother alone in an empty house.

"You know," Bella muses, "When we were kids, after my mom left, I sort of always wanted your mom and my dad to get married."

"Really?" I don't admit that, at least for a while, I wanted that, too. Until I started noticing eyes and lips and decided that maybe stepsister wasn't exactly the role I wanted Bella to play in my life.

"Really. Your mom is so sweet, and Charlie…" She trails off and shakes her head. "He's hopeless when it comes to dating."

I try to picture Chief Swan going out for dinner with a woman, but I can't see him in anything but his police-issued uniform or a plaid flannel shirt. "Not too many options in Forks," I say finally, and Bella chuckles.

"Isn't that the truth?" I can't tell if we're still talking about our parents or if Bella's mind has come full-circle back to Mike, but she takes another swig from her bottle and the half-smile fades from her lips. "I don't…if I'm pregnant, I don't think I'm going to keep it." Brown eyes find mine. "Do you think that makes me a bad person?"

I don't even need time to think about that; I shake my head. "No. I think it makes you seventeen."

She blows out a breath. "I just…I really want to go to college. And I want to have a career. And I know my father would say, 'Well, you should have thought of that.' But I just…I was stupid. I know I was. But I still want things, and I don't know how I'd make them happen if I had a baby before I ever left high school." Her nose wrinkles, as if she's smelled something unpleasant. "And I don't think I want a reminder of Mike for the rest of my life."

"Can't blame you there," I say, feeling more willing to bad-mouth her ex-boyfriend as time wears on. I just hope that, come September, she hasn't gone back to him. "So why would you even have to tell your dad? I mean, if you're not going to keep it?"

She sighs. "Insurance. It'll show up somehow on Charlie's insurance bill, I'm sure. And I can't afford to pay cash." She looks down. "And…I don't know…I feel like I fucked up enough as it is. I don't want to lie to him. Maybe it's a good thing Mike and I broke up, anyway. If he's not around, maybe my dad won't get in trouble for assault."

I half-laugh, but she looks serious. "Why did you break up?"

She tips her head back against the headrest of the chair and lolls it from side to side in an approximation of a head-shake. "Because he's an asshole," she says simply. "A cheating asshole."

"Oh." I frown at the knees of my jeans. "Well, I'd offer to kick his ass for you, but I don't think me winding up in traction will help your situation any." It's the first honest-to-God laugh I've heard out of her all night – the first one in years, in fact – and it makes something almost-forgotten bloom in my chest. "Seriously," I continue. "He may be a cheating asshole, but he's a _big_ cheating asshole. With a lot of big, football-playing, asshole friends. And I like you and everything, but having my limbs in plaster isn't exactly how I want to spend the rest of my summer vacation."

She's still giggling, and I feel my own smile stretch my face. "Well, your sort-of chivalry is duly noted."

I nod. "Excellent. If you have any cute, single friends, be sure to spread the word that I'm a sort-of-chivalrous type who'd be happy to buy them dinner."

"I'll do that," she says, but her amusement dims slightly.

"What?"

She shakes her head. "I don't know if…" She picks at her nail. "I'm not sure I have much pull with those girls these days." Glancing up at me, she half-shrugs. "The cheating asshole was cheating with one of them."

I feel a pang of sympathy for her. Losing friends hurts. "Well, they're not really my type, anyway."

"Oh?" she asks, and I'm pretty sure I can see relief on her face. "And what is your type?"

I pretend to consider the question, making a show of tapping my chin with my index finger and staring at the ceiling. "Must love dorks. Tolerant of gaming. At least a passing understanding of _Dungeons & Dragons_. Meat-eater."

Her lips twitch. "Is that a euphemism?"

I frown momentarily before my eyes go wide, and I feel the dreaded flush creeping up my neck. "What? No!"

She giggles again. "Just checking."

"I mean…that would be fine, too, of course. Great, even. Better than great." I scratch my nose. "I didn't mean…that, though."

She wraps her lips around the mouth of her water bottle, and if she isn't doing that shit on purpose, she's the most obliviously coquettish chick in the history of the world. Or at least my corner of it. "Okay," she says, peeking over at me before lowering the Dasani and reaching out a fingertip. I think she's going to poke me in the chest until she touches my name tag. "Is that the TARDIS?"

I can't hide my surprise. "You watch 'Doctor Who'?"

She shrugs. "I like it. I haven't seen many of them, though; I just started watching some on Netflix."

"Which ones are you watching?"

"Um, some of the older ones with David Tennant?"

I nod. "Those are good ones."

She mirrors my nod. "That's good flair."

I laugh. "Thanks." We fall silent again, and something she said nags at me. "What if…" I lick my lips. "What if I went with you? To tell Charlie?"

"What?"

"Moral support, or whatever."

"Edward, that's really sweet. But if you were standing beside me when told my father that I was pregnant, he'd think it was yours."

I'm treated to a sudden vision of tripping down the front porch steps of the Swans' house, the sound of bullets roaring through the air around me. Then I imagine Bella, standing alone in front of her dad, and something solidifies inside me. "Well…" I swallow. "I mean, if you're not planning to have it anyway, what does it matter whose he thinks it is?"

Shock. There's no other way to describe the look on Bella's face, and she doesn't say anything as she stares at me. I start to squirm, feeling increasingly uncomfortable the longer she stays silent. "I mean, I realize the idea of sleeping with me probably isn't the most appealing concept ever, but it's not like anyone at school has to know. And maybe the fact that we were once friends – or neighbors – means your dad won't shoot me." She's still staring, and I'm starting to panic. "Okay, please say something."

"You'd seriously do that?"

"Yes," I say immediately, and she's back to staring.

"Edward," she begins, but she doesn't say anything more. She's still staring at me, and just as I start to fidget, a soft "Why?" falls from her lips.

I stop, considering her question. Why, indeed? "Because we were friends, once." She doesn't say anything, just keeps looking at me like she's waiting for more, and as was always the case with Bella, I want to give her whatever she wants. "Remember that time we got into a fight over by the creek and you were mad at me so you walked all the way home by yourself?"

"Yeah."

"Well, after a couple of days, my mom asked me why you weren't coming over, and I told her about our fight and about you walking home. She told me that being best friends with a girl is a sacred thing. She said it meant that I always had to look out for you, even when we were mad at each other." I shrug. "After that I couldn't get it out of my head, and it made me feel sort of…protective I guess." I shake my head, embarrassment creeping in. "It's stupid."

"It's not stupid." Her voice is still soft, and I'm too embarrassed to look at her.

"Anyway, it's probably that."

I'm even more embarrassed by the implication: that even after four years of her essentially ignoring me, it hasn't gone away. I don't know if that makes me noble or just really pathetic, but with the way she's staring at me right now, I don't give a shit which one it is.

"Thank you."

"Yeah."

"No, seriously. Thank you." She frowns. "For being a better friend to me than I ever was to you." I shrug, but any nonchalance I was going for vanishes the moment her small, cool hand closes over mine. "We still have an entire senior year left. Do you think you'd let me make it up to you?"

My sense of self-preservation is whispering in my ear, all of the possible what-if scenarios that would have her back at her usual lunch table come September with me once again left out in the cold. But as I gaze at her and see the open, expectant, hopeful look on her face, for whatever reason, I believe her. I was never a very good liar, but neither was Bella. And she's still holding my hand.

"Sure," I say. "But you're going to have to learn to play _Dungeons & Dragons_."

She laughs. "Deal." Letting go of my hand, she reaches for her water again and drains it, wiping her lips with the back of her free hand in a gesture so reminiscent of years ago that it makes me smile. As she recaps the bottle, she looks up at me, her eyes suddenly terrified. The protectiveness I'd alluded to swells within me again, and this time I'm the one who reaches for her hand. "Ready?"

Her mouth twitches again, and I know the inside of her bottom lip is going to be sore tomorrow. "Okay." She follows me to the back of the store and through the staff room door, which I prop open with a cinderblock so that I'll be able to hear the bell over the front door on the off-chance that someone else comes into the store. I gesture to the small door on the right-hand wall with the standard male/female restroom sign on it. "There you go."

She nods and, clutching the plastic bag tightly in a white-knuckled fist, crosses the small space and disappears into the restroom. I hear the click of the lock, and I lower to a crouch with my back against the open door, hands clasped between my knees. I'm not much for God or prayer, but I find a one-word mantra looping over and over in my brain.

_Please._

_Please._

I hear the rustle and tear of a box being opened and then silence; I assume she must be reading some instructions, although I can't imagine how complicated "pee on the stick" can be. Then I hear some familiar but private sounds, and I begin humming to drown out the sound of Bella peeing. I might maybe-love her and everything, but that doesn't mean I need to hear…things. Rustling, a zip, a flush, the sound of water running, the crinkle of paper towels, and she appears in the open doorway. I look up, my heart suddenly hammering, but her face is a mask. Finally, I can't take the suspense. "Well?!"

Her eyebrows hitch slightly. "Oh. Um. We have to wait. Three minutes."

Glancing down, I fiddle with the digital watch Dr. Cullen gave me for Christmas. It's really cool and has all of these functions and features, and I'm actually pretty psyched about this three minutes thing, because I'm not the jock-type, and most of the things you'd use a stopwatch-timer for are jock-type things. Granted, I never anticipated that my first opportunity to use this particular function would be to time a pregnancy test, but still. "Okay," I say over the beep that signals time is running and stand up. "Got it. Three minutes." She nods and wrings her hands.

"Holy shit," she breathes, and I stare at her face.

"What?"

"I just…these could be the last three minutes, you know? Like, the last three minutes before…things are different." I don't revisit the fact that she has already decided not to keep it – if there is an "it" – because I don't know shit about girls and pregnancy and abortions and what that might do to a girl like Bella. Instead, I feel a sudden sense of purpose.

"Okay. What should we do?"

Her forehead creases in confusion. "What?"

"The next three minutes. Let's do something. Something…stupid or funny or fun or…just…something." She shakes her head, clearly still not quite clueing in to my meaning, when sudden inspiration strikes me. Grabbing her hand, I drag her to the front corner of the store and the ice cream fridge situated beside the drinks cooler. "Pick one."

"What? Edward—"

"Come on! Two minutes and thirty seconds. Just…pick one!"

She leans over the cooler – curves, so many curves – and reaches for the handle of the door, sliding it aside and reaching in. When her hand comes out clutching a turbo rocket Popsicle, I know without a doubt that there's no maybe about loving her. Still.

I reach in and grab my go-to – a Chipwich – and as I begin yanking the wrapper off, she follows my lead. I take a massive bite of the ice-cream-cookie-chocolate-chip goodness and chew, cringing slightly as the sudden cold makes my molars ache. Bella wraps her lips around the Popsicle and if I thought the water bottle was bad, I had no idea what torture lay in store for me now.

"Oh my God," she murmurs, closing her eyes. "I forgot how good these were." Then, however, she bites the tip of the ice pop off, and my fantasies are effectively destroyed.

"Right?" I say, watching as she works her Popsicle and I take huge bites out of my dessert. Her faintly red lips wrap around the pop again, taking another chunk with them when she pulls off, and around the hunk of cherry-flavored ice rolling around in her mouth, she asks. "Ow muh time?"

I glance down at my watch. "One fifty-five," I say, taking another bite.

She bounces on her toes, and I don't know if it's the ice she's chomping or the countdown to her perceived moment of life upheaval, but I want, suddenly, to freeze time and stay in this moment with her forever. I don't want to know if she's pregnant with Mike Newton's kid or if she isn't; I don't want to finish my cookie-ice-cream sandwich or have her toss her Popsicle stick in the trash. I want this moment to stretch out ahead of us like a long road with no traffic and no turn-offs and no roadside stops: just a long stretch of road we have to walk together.

I don't realize I've stopped eating until she reaches out and wraps her cold fingers around my wrist, forcibly lifting my Chipwich to my mouth. "Come on!" she demands around a mouthful of white ice, and I follow her directions, taking another bite as Bella gets closer to the blue end of her pop.

Another peek at my watch. "One minute."

She bounces some more, which does admittedly wonderful things to a few of those newly acquired curves in particular, and I should probably feel bad for checking out the tits of a potentially pregnant girl I've known since I was five, but I don't. I simply take another bite and watch as Bella's lips begin to turn purple. Just as I stuff the remaining bite of my Chipwich in my mouth, Bella sucks the final blue chunk of ice from the wooden stick, half-chewing and wincing and nodding her head toward my wrist.

"Thirty seconds," I say, and she nods as we stand stock-still, staring at each other and chewing the last bites of our sweets. I swallow, then she does, and we're staring at each other until the sound of a triple-beep echoes in the otherwise silent store. I break her gaze to glance down at my watch. "Time."

She laughs, but it's a nervous laugh and I want to hug her. "I think I have brain-freeze," she says, and I wonder if that's code-speak for, _"Holy fuck, I'm scared out of my mind."_

"Me too," I say, which is code-speak for, _"Me too."_

Before I can turn to lead the way back to the bathroom, Bella steps up close to me so that I can no longer see her curves or her clothes or anything but her deep brown eyes, her barely-there freckles, and her purple-tinted mouth – all the things that haven't changed. "Thank you, Edward," she says, and wraps her arms around my back, under my arms, ducking her chin and tucking her head into my chest. Immediately, I feel my arms rising to wrap around her back, and I rest my chin on the crown of her head. I can smell her shampoo – something faintly sweet like honey or almond milk – and I try to breathe normally. I want to thank her right back, but that would be weird, so I don't say anything. Instead, I just hold her until she pulls away. "Okay. Now or never, right?"

I half-nod, half-shrug, because this is her show. I follow her to the back this time and resume my place beside the door as she disappears into the bathroom. Almost immediately, she's back, her eyes as wide as saucers. I try to think of something supportive and encouraging to say – "_It'll be all right,"_ or _"You'll be fine,"_ or _"Everything will be okay"_ – but really all I'm thinking is _FUCK_ until I realize she's bouncing on her toes again.

"Negative," she squeaks, and something unravels in my chest. "Negative!" She crows, her eyes bright and cheeks flushed and hair a beautiful mess. "It's negative!" She's still bouncing, a white and blue stick that looks strangely like a pen gripped in one hand, and I'm grinning at her as her eyes go from the test to my face and back to the test. The brief burst of relief is short-lived, however, as she stills and a tiny crease appears between her eyebrows. "What if it's wrong?"

I glance at the discarded bag on the sink ledge behind her and the half-hidden open box inside it. "Maybe that's why there are two?"

"Oh," she says, glancing over her shoulder. "Right." Chewing the inside of her lip for a beat, she nods once, resolute, half-turning to chuck the test in the trash before facing me again. "Okay. This round's on me." Filled with a new sense of purpose, she marches through the door and toward the front of the store, snagging another bottle of water from the rack and glancing over her shoulder at me. "Another Dr. Pepper?"

"Uh, sure." She grabs a bottle and heads toward me, holding it out.

"Okay. Chug."

"I'm going to be on one hell of a sugar high," I say, raising the bottle to my lips, and Bella wraps her lips around the mouth of her water bottle and winks, and it's the sexiest fucking thing I've ever seen. I lower the bottle and clear my throat before lifting it again and starting to drink, watching Bella's mouth and throat muscles and chest and the way her brown eyes stare at the ceiling and the way her lower lip is still purple and how could I have ever thought that this girl was gone? She pauses halfway through the bottle and licks her lips, chest heaving, gulping breaths before lifting it to her mouth again and sucking down the rest of the water.

"Okay. That'll probably take a few minutes," she says, and I gulp the last of my soda down, the carbonation and sugar mingling in my chest, and I wonder if this is the buzz that people who drink coffee are going for. If so, they're nuts, because it's pretty unpleasant. A sudden, violent belch escapes my mouth, and I'm just opening my mouth to apologize when Bella giggles.

"I'd give that an eight-point-five," she says, and instantly I remember when we were ten and I tried to teach her to belch the alphabet. She was hopeless.

"I feel…sort of sick," I admit, and Bella looks mildly nauseous.

"Yeah. My stomach feels…sloshy."

I laugh. "Sloshy?"

She shrugs. "That's how it feels." Rubbing my own stomach, I nod in agreement. "Sloshy" is actually a pretty good descriptor. She flops into one of the canvas beach chairs we'd abandoned, and I lower myself into the one beside her, hand still rubbing my stomach.

"I need food," I say absently, the sugar surging through my veins and making me feel like the only solution is a greasy burger and a mountain of fries.

"Diner's open until midnight," Bella reminds me, and I nod.

"After we close, I'm definitely getting a burger."

"Me too."

I peek over at her and she flushes, peering up at me from beneath lowered lids. "I mean…if you don't mind the company. My treat. It's the least I can do."

"Bella, there's no way I'm letting you pay."

"Oh, right. I forgot about your almost-chivalrous nature," she teases, and I roll my eyes.

"I may not be Don Quixote, but I can at least buy a girl a burger." The words are surprisingly revealing – far more so than I intended – and I realize that they came out sounding very…date-like. "I mean…not that it's like that. I know that. I didn't mean…" I trail off, searching for the right words.

"I, um. I would consider myself a willing participant?"

"Huh?" Still adrift in my sea of ill-chosen words, I'm lost as to what the heck she's talking about.

"You know…the…dating thing? You said you were missing the other half of the equation? I could…be it. If you wanted."

_If I wanted. If I wanted Bella. If._

"Yes," is all I can think to say. And then, "I want." The truest words I've ever said, perhaps.

"Okay," she says, blowing out a relieved breath. Then, quieter, almost to herself, "Okay." We sit in silence for a few minutes, the hum of the overhead fluorescents and the hum of the drink cooler and the hum of the ice cream freezer the only sounds in the entire store. I realize, amid all of the humming, that Bella just asked me out. _Bella_ just asked _me _out, and maybe it should make me feel like less of a man, more of a dork, but all it really makes me is happy.

"Edward?"

"Yeah?"

"Since I maybe might not be pregnant…"

"Yeah?"

"Would you like to come over and watch 'Doctor Who' with me sometime?" Suddenly, I realize something that I haven't thought about in years: I've never been inside Bella's new house. I don't know what her bedroom looks like, or if she has a tree in her yard, or if Charlie put another hoop in the driveway. "I mean, if the test is still negative," she says quickly, mistaking my silence for indecision. "I get that…_that_…might make things…different?" It's question, though, as if she's as uncertain of me as I have been of her for the past four years.

_Four years._

"Bella, I'd love to. I just…tonight's been great. Better than great. This was fun, and I've…really missed you. But I don't want us to become friends again if you're just going to ditch me again down the road. I realize I'm not Mike Newton, but I have my pride."

"You're not Mike," she agrees softly, and I feel the balloon of hope that had inflated in me at her invitation begin to shrink. "And thank God for that."

And hope surges anew. Suddenly Bella rises from the chair and makes her way to the bathroom without looking back to see if I'm following. Which, of course, I am. She disappears into the restroom and I hum to give her a modicum of privacy; when she reemerges, she lowers herself and sits beside where I'm crouched against the open staff room door. I set my watch without her asking, and we sit side by side, staring at the shelves across from us that are stocked with inventory and rolls of receipt paper and garbage bags and cleaning products.

"Hey, Bella?" I ask when there are two minutes to go.

"Yeah?"

"Why did your dad chop down that tree?"

In my peripheral vision, I see her turn to face me. "The pear tree?"

"Yeah."

"It was at the end of its life span," she says simply. "It had to be cut before it started to split."

"Oh." More silence, until there's only one minute left. "I really liked that tree."

"Me too." Her voice is soft, and this time I'm the one who turns to look at her.

"There's still a stump," I tell her, and her eyebrows hitch slightly. I don't know why I said that, or what significance it holds, but I feel like the fact that there's still a reminder – that the earth isn't smooth and flat like it would have been if Charlie had dug it out from the roots – means _something_.

"We have a really pretty oak tree in our backyard now," she says, and with thirty seconds to go, she reaches out and laces her fingers through mine. "The lowest branches are pretty high – we never could have reached them when we were kids – but I can just about reach the lowest one now. You wouldn't have a problem with it." Then, as I'm staring once again at the crooked part in her hair, she looks up at me and grins. "Wanna go tree climbing with me?"

"Yes."

Her grin widens, and her eyes drop to my mouth.

_Holy shit._

Her lips are still faintly purple and so, so pretty, and I've never wanted anything as much as I want to kiss this girl, in this moment. I can feel the sugar rolling around in my stomach, my heart thumping hard against my ribs, a knot of something – _fear? Want? _– forming at the back of my throat. Just as I square my shoulders slightly and begin to lean toward her, the mechanical beep-beep-beep of my watch breaks the moment.

"Time," she breathes, and I pull away, glancing at the watch that I suddenly hate as much as I'd loved it five minutes ago.

"Time," I echo, hoping that we get more of it. She rises, stepping into the bathroom and picking up the stick of the ledge of the sink. Her head is bent as she peers at it, and after a few beats, she drops it into the plastic trash can beside the toilet. Turning, she smiles. "Not pregnant."

I let my head fall back against the door behind me. "Thank God."

She laughs. "Tell me about it." I grin up at her but she's staring at me, a thoughtful look on her face. Before I can wonder too much about what she's thinking, she crosses the room and lowers herself to her knees beside me, placing a cool hand on my neck and leaning in. The moment those purple lips are on mine, I'm done. She kisses me slow and soft and sweet, her mouth partly open, warm, Popsicle-flavored breath puffing into my mouth until she pulls away. I want to pull her mouth back to mine, slip my tongue against hers, taste her for real, but I open my eyes and the last word she said before disappearing into the bathroom echoes in my brain. _Time._

"When do you get off?" she breathes against my mouth.

_In about six seconds, if you kiss me like that again._ "Um," I say aloud. "Ten."

"Okay," she says, pressing one more soft kiss to my lips before rising and holding out a hand. I accept it and she pulls me to standing. "Is it okay if I wait for you? Here?"

"Absolutely."

She smiles, but suddenly her expression dims and she's chewing the inside of her mouth again. "What is it?" I ask, reaching out with a thumb and pulling gently on her chin to stop her chewing; it's amazing, how I suddenly feel free to just _touch_ her, when two hours ago I couldn't even _talk_ to her.

"I feel like I should tell you that I'm sort of turned off by the idea of sex at the moment," she says, her eyes uncertain. "I feel like you should know that, going in."

It's probably telling that even with sex off the table, I still want to just be with her. That said, hearing her say the word "sex" doesn't leave me entirely unaffected, and the idea that she's even entertaining the notion of sex in relation to _me_ is going to fuel my fantasies for a long time, regardless of how quickly it does or doesn't happen. "I don't care," I admit. "As long as you'll still let me kiss you." Because I've never been one for the rocket Popsicles, but tasting them on her lips is pretty fucking amazing.

"You really don't care?"

"Bella, I've gone without for seventeen years. A couple more won't kill me." _They might make my balls explode and the skin of my dick chafe from excessive wanking, but they won't kill me._

She rises to her toes and kisses me again, soft little Bella-kisses. "I promise it won't be years," she says against my lips.

Annnnnd I'm hard again.


	2. Chapter 2

**Topsy-Turvy**

**Rating: **M.

**Summary: **"You've always been the one," I murmur, and the truth of those words settles in my chest, heavy and featherlight at the same time. She pulls back to look at me, and I can see it in her face: she wishes she could say the same, but we both know that there were years in there where it just wasn't true.

**Acknowledgement: **I'm running out of ways to say how awesome HollettLA is, but I'm working on a list. It starts with "able to beta from 30,000 feet" and is up to "vodka makes for hysterical margin notes." xo

* * *

_**Author's Note: **__Thanks to everyone who spread the word about Mully The Traveling Cat. He is safely home. xo_

* * *

It's happening. Holy fucking shit, it's happening.

Well, I mean, not _right_ now. But tonight. Tonight, it's happening. I will finally, _finally_ know what it's like to come inside something that isn't a hand or a mouth.

Wait. That sounds bad. Let me back up. I offer this disclaimer: coming inside Bella's hand is light-years better than coming in my own. Coming inside her mouth is – well, not to employ hyperbole, but it's a pretty fucking spiritual experience. It's warm and wet and…and now I'm hard and Bella won't be here for another three hours. But I'm hard and it occurs to me that maybe whacking off before she gets here might not be a bad idea. I mean, I fucking hate Mike Newton – _hate _him – but I can't imagine that he was a two-pump chump, and the absolute _last_ thing I want happening tonight is for Bella, even fleetingly, to compare me to that asshole. That would be…not good.

So…yeah, that's what I'll do. A little pre-game warm-up.

Definitely.

* * *

Approximately thirty-seven seconds. That was…shameful. Jacking off ahead of time was definitely a good idea. Jesus, thirty-seven seconds wouldn't even have gotten me inside her. I may be a rookie at this, but even _I _know that thirty seconds isn't an adequate amount of foreplay. You'd think semi-regular hand jobs and relatively frequent blow jobs would have built up at least a minimal amount of staying power, but you'd be wrong. The second I imagined feeling around my dick what I've been feeling around my fingers for the past two months, I blew my load without even enough time to pull back on the reins.

I wash my hands in the sink and dry them on the plaid hand towel hanging nearby just as Rosalie bangs on the door. "Stop jerking off in the bathroom, Foward," she calls, still banging. "A girl is using it this week, too."

"I wasn't—I'm not—" As I let go of the towel, I knock over the soap dispenser, and I can hear her laughing through the door. In an attempt to prove my point – my lie – I throw the door open as I right the mercifully unbroken soap canister. "I wasn't doing _that,_" I snap, and Rose's lips twitch.

"Right."

I glare at her as I storm past, and she reels backward with a muttered "What the—" as I cross the hall to my bedroom and slam the door before flopping down on my unmade bed. I'm grateful, at least, that my mother washed my sheets last night; I should probably attempt to make the bed before Bella shows up, too. Because in two hours and forty-five minutes, she'll be here. In my bedroom. In my _bed_. It won't be a first, but what we're doing…that will be. Well, at least for me. For _us_. If not for her.

"Edward?" This time, the knock is timid, as is the voice. That she's calling me by my name and not "Foward" – an unfortunate result of her surprise visit to the drugstore on a day when I was working – is a clear sign that she feels badly. "Edward, can I come in?"

"Whatever," I mutter, rolling so that my chin is propped on my mattress, facing away from the door. I hear the sound of it opening and Rose's bare feet slapping on the hardwood floor.

"What's with you?" she asks, and the mattress dips as she sits on the edge of it, down by my shins.

"Nothing," I mutter, voice half-muffled by my comforter.

"Bullshit," she says. As irritating as she can be, I sometimes miss my sister's directness. I don't say anything, and I hear her sigh. "I'm sorry I was teasing you. I know you weren't…doing that."

Still a terrible liar, I don't turn to face her, certain that my expression would give me away. "It doesn't matter," I say, staring at the picture of Bella pinned to the corkboard above my desk on the opposite side of the room.

"Seriously, what's _with_ you? Did something happen with Bella?"

_Not yet._

"No," I say aloud. "Nothing. I'm fine."

She doesn't say anything, resorting instead to pinching the skin of my calf. Hard. "OW!" I yell, half-rolling and pulling my leg up to rub at the injured skin. "Fucking hell, Rose. What was that for?"

"I'm leaving in an hour, so this is your last chance at advice from your big sister. If it's girl-stuff, I'm particularly well-equipped to help you out. So spill it, little brother."

I roll onto my back, staring at the ceiling. "It's nothing."

"Liar," she mutters, rearranging herself so that she's lying beside me. "Holy shit," she says on a laugh, gazing upward. "You still have glow-in-the-dark stars on your ceiling?"

"They're not just glow-in-the-dark _stars_," I defend. "That's actually a glow-in-the-dark replica of the autumn sky with all of the constellations visible in the Northern Hemisphere."

"Okay, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you do realize that that makes it _more_ geeky, not less, right?"

"Shut up," I mutter, even as I'm picking out Cygnus among the barely-visible yellow dots against the white paint.

"So what is it, kid?"

Rosalie hasn't called me "kid" in years, and it makes something in me want to confide in her, even if I don't know how in the hell a seventeen-year-old guy says "I'm afraid I'll suck in bed" to his older sister. I'm still staring at the ceiling.

_Cygnus: the swan._

I remember the first time I had Bella in my bed at night, when Mom was on a date with Dr. Cullen, and she noticed the adhesive stars after we'd both collapsed, breathless, atop my comforter, summer heat and the heat we made together plastering damp hair to our necks and foreheads. "Whoa," she'd breathed, and when I realized what she was looking at, I felt suddenly more exposed than I had minutes earlier when she had my dick in her hand. "Edward, your ceiling…that's really cool." She'd asked me to point out all of the constellations, and then she chose her favorites. _Cygnus. Pegasus._ _Delphinus._

_The swan, the flying horse, the dolphin._

"Come on," Rosalie coaxes me now. "You can talk to me."

"I don't—" I scrub my hands over my face.

"Okay. Let me guess. Is it about sex?" I roll my head to look at her, surprise clear in my features, and she laughs. "Don't look so surprised. How many things are there that you would be so embarrassed about discussing with me?" Her eyes narrow. "Bella's not pregnant, is she?"

"Jesus, no," I say immediately, the memory of the pharmacy staff room just over three months ago sliding through my mind briefly before I shake my head. "No. Definitely not."

"Okay. And you don't…have something, right? Like…a disease or something?"

"No!"

"Okay. Good. So what is it?"

I don't realize I'm chewing on the inside of my lower lip at first, and I can see suddenly how Bella winds up with raw skin sometimes. "We haven't…yet. We're…going to. Tonight. And I'm just…I haven't. Before. Ever. But she has. And I'm just…I'm freaked out about…sucking at it."

"You probably will."

"Well, thanks a lot, Rose. That helps a _ton._"

She laughs, and I kind of want to strangle her. "Relax, Edward. You might. She might. You're a seventeen-year-old virgin. Most seventeen-year-old virgins _do_ suck at sex. In fact, most seventeen-year-old non-virgins suck at sex, too. It's something that takes practice, and it also takes learning what your partner likes and what you like and how to make both of those things line up so that it doesn't suck for either one of you. And seventeen-year-olds aren't in the habit of openly discussing what they like and don't, so sometimes it's even more complicated than it needs to be."

"Well, terrific," I mutter, and now I'm glaring at the stars above us.

"Listen, don't put so much pressure on yourself. You love Bella. She loves you. Tonight isn't about the sex itself. It's about what it means to both of you. Just…focus on that."

"Rose, that's really sweet and all, but it's sort of girly bullshit, too. Can you actually give me something concrete that will help me?"

"Well, you've done _stuff_ with Bella before, right?"

My mind passes over the "stuff" I have, in fact, done with Bella, and a small smile tugs at my mouth. "Yeah."

"Okay. So you know some of the stuff she likes."

"Yeah." _Do I ever._

"Good. Do that first."

"What?"

"You probably won't make her come once you're inside her, no matter how many times you spank the monkey beforehand." She smirks at me, and I feel fire steal across my face. "So make her come first. It's considerate, it literally shows that you're putting her pleasure ahead of your own, and then when you blow your load after ten seconds, she won't care."

"Fucking hell, Rose."

She pats my forearm. "I'm going to interpret that as a 'Thank you,'" she says, then sighs. When she speaks again, her voice is uncharacteristically somber. "These are the times it must really suck not to have a dad around, huh?"

I shrug. "I don't know. Do guys normally talk to their dads about that stuff?"

"Hell if I know," she says. "I didn't talk to Mom about _everything_, but I at least knew she was there if I wanted to." She pauses. "You know, I'm sure you wouldn't want to, but Mom is pretty cool about sex stuff, and I'm sure she assumes you and Bella are doing it, anyway. She'd probably be okay with talking about it, if you ever wanted to."

"Hell no."

My sister laughs. "I didn't think so." We lie side by side for a few minutes, staring up at my make-believe September sky. "I know I'm far away, but my phone works," she says softly. "You can always call me. And…I know you've only met him once, but Emmett's a really good guy. I'm sure he would be happy to talk anytime you wanted a guy's perspective."

I turn this over for a few minutes. As much as I value my friendship with Jasper, he's even less experienced than I am. The only other male with any sort of regular role in my life is Dr. Cullen, and talking to a doctor about the mechanics of sex – particularly a doctor who is likely engaging in said mechanics with my _mother_, of all people – is a bizarrely off-putting concept. "Thanks," I say lamely. The likelihood that I'll ever call the guy who's engaging in the mechanics with my sister is also low, but it's nice of Rosalie to offer.

"And keep in mind that Bella doesn't have her mom around, either. So it's not like she has anyone to go to for advice. So maybe…that can be another thing that makes you guys close? Like, if you have to talk to each other about it, maybe it'll actually wind up being a good thing?"

My sister's always been book-smart _and_ street-smart while I was book-smart but life-naïve, but that might be the smartest thing I've ever heard her say. "Thanks, Rose," I say, and she pats my arm again.

"So this is the part of the program where I remind you to wrap it up."

"Got it covered," I say, and Rose laughs as I add, "So to speak." That's one thing that has made working in a pharmacy come in handy, at least. Two, if we count the whole "bringing Bella back into my life" thing, which we probably should.

"Good." She sits up and pokes my shin. "And, you know…practice makes perfect. So even if it sucks tonight…keep at it."

This time, I'm the one who laughs. "Noted."

"So this is why you're not coming to the airport with us, huh?" I blush and find that I have no plausible denial, so I rub my hands over my face and groan theatrically. Rose laughs. "Don't worry, I'm not insulted. I'm just glad it's not one of those stupid _Dungeons & Demons_ marathons, or something."

"_Dungeons & Dragons_," I mutter, and she ruffles my hair. I _hate_ it when she does that shit, but just this once, I let her.

"Right. Well, have fun putting your dragon in her dungeon," she says in a singsong voice as she rises from the bed. "See you at Thanksgiving."

I'd never tell her, but I sort of miss my bitchy sister when she's not around. "Hey, Rose?" She half-turns, manicured nails gripping the edge of my bedroom door. "Thanks," I say, and she grins.

"Anytime, Foward."

* * *

Okay, this is the part where I come across as a sissy. Bella was ready at the end of summer. When she came into the pharmacy at the tail end of June and turned my world upside down in the best possible way, I was honest with her: there was part of me that – despite her apology and her claim that she was done with Mike and those mean, cliquey girls – feared that come September, she'd be back on their side of the cafeteria, and I'd once again be kicked to the curb. And I knew that it would hurt.

Having kissed Bella, touched Bella, tasted Bella, I knew that it would hurt like a bitch, perhaps even worse than it hurt the first time. But if I slept with Bella, gave her that part of me and then she walked away afterward? That would do worse than hurt. So I stalled. Hedged. Played hard-to-get.

In short, I became the chick.

I'm not proud of it, but self-preservation is perhaps the one skill that the geeks, the nerds, the losers hone in high school far better than the more popular, less tortured kids. We learn how to survive. We learn how to assess possible threats, how to take measures to avoid confrontations, how brace for the impact of a blow before it lands. As time wore on, as Bella told me she loved me, wanted me, that punch seemed less and less likely to come.

And still, I waited. I braced myself.

I didn't tell Bella, but I was waiting for school to start. I was waiting to see if, on September 4th, she would let me pick her up in my shitty green Volvo station wagon and drive her to school. If she'd step out of the passenger seat of that craptastic car and not duck her head in embarrassment. If she'd walk into the cafeteria and spot me at my table in the back corner and take a seat beside me, regardless of what the Mikes and the Laurens at the table smack-dab in the center of the room might think or say.

I was testing her, and that might make me a bastard, but sometimes self-preservation has that unavoidable, if unfortunate, effect. I couldn't risk it. I couldn't risk losing _it_ to _her_, and then losing _her_ altogether. There are risks that are manageable, and risks that can destroy a person, and that would definitely fall into the category of the latter.

And, as time wore on, as kisses turned to touches and touches turned into a whole new type of kisses, Bella seemed to catch on. When she was in just her panties in my bed the last weekend in July and I was down to boxers and she wrapped her hand around me and breathed, "Do you want to?" and I didn't. On a late-August night, when we were both naked in the cargo area of my wagon and I was _right there_ and I hesitated and she kissed my cheek and said, "It's okay" before pulling back and sliding down my body.

I think she got it, knew what I was waiting for, because she never pushed.

And then came September 4th.

And Bella let me pick her up in my shitty station wagon, and when we pulled into the Forks High School parking lot, she let me open her door and help her out and then planted a kiss on my mouth in front of everyone.

And when I walked into the cafeteria fifth period, I didn't have to wonder if she'd choose to sit with me because she was already there at my table, waiting with Jasper.

And in the hallway, she held my hand and kissed me and waited by my locker and let me carry her books. Not only did she not seem to care what Mike or Jessica or Lauren said, she didn't even seem to notice. All she seemed to notice was me. And the last shred of hesitation, the last tiny weight holding me down, the last thin thread of insecurity – they all just disappeared. I told her that my mother was taking Rosalie to the airport in Seattle on the last Friday in September and would be gone overnight, and she said her father was working the overnight shift that night, and I knew that we were here.

_Finally._

And now, of course, I'm scared shitless that it's going to suck.

* * *

"Okay, hon," my mother says, attempting to flatten my hair. "I'll be back tomorrow afternoon. I left a dish of baked mac and cheese in the fridge for dinner; it just needs to be reheated. Twenty minutes on 400 degrees, and don't forget to switch the oven off afterward."

"Okay," I reply, hoisting Rose's ridiculously heavy wheeled suitcase into the back of Dr. Cullen's Mercedes SUV. What the hell did she pack for a four-day visit, for crying out loud?

"I have my cell phone if you need me, and Carlisle has his, so call us if you need anything, okay?"

"Okay," I say again, shoving my hands deep into the pockets of my jeans in what I know will be a futile attempt to ward off any potential touchy-feely displays of affection. Utterly undeterred, Rose presses a kiss to my cheek and ruffles my hair – _damn her_ – and smiles knowingly at me. "See ya, little brother." Dr. Cullen nods at me and claps me on the shoulder before opening both passenger-side doors – front and back – for my mother and sister and then rounding the car to slide in behind the wheel.

"Is Bella coming over?" my mom asks as Rosalie disappears into the backseat, and I burrow my hands farther into my pockets.

"Yeah. I mean…probably. Yeah." I can't look at her. I'm a bad liar in general, but my mother may as well be a CIA interrogator, for all the success I've ever had trying to keep a secret from her. She gently grabs my chin and tilts my head up so that I'm forced to meet her eye and gives me a long look but says nothing. I gaze back at her, trying not to squirm, silently pleading with her not to say something that's going to make me want to die. "Tell her I said hello," she says finally, and I nod in relief.

_Sure, Mom. I'll tell her. Right after I lose my virginity to her on the sheets you bought me from L.L. Bean. I'll definitely follow that up with, "My mom says hi."_

She mirrors my nod and gives me another mom-look before turning and sliding into the passenger seat of Dr. Cullen's car.

Great. I'm pretty sure my mother knows I'm going to have sex with my girlfriend under her roof tonight.

_Awesome._

* * *

I've been doing research. Because I'm a nerd, and that's what we do. I stole one of Rosalie's issues of _Cosmopolitan_ that she bought on the plane ride from New York. I watched a couple of _Sex and the _City reruns, but they were syndicated and I think a lot of the stuff that would have been especially helpful was edited out. I Googled…stuff.

And I'm still as clueless as I was before.

I don't know where Bella's G-spot is, or if it's really a thing, or if I have any chance in hell of finding it. She seems to like what we've done together so far, but there's never been a moment where she's reacted like I hit a magic button inside of her or anything. I don't know if I'm supposed to let her pick the position, or if I'm supposed to pick it, or if that's something you decide on ahead of time, like, "Hey, Bella, shall we go with missionary or doggy-style today?" I don't know if I put the condom on as soon as I'm hard, or if I wait until I'm actually about to push inside her; I don't know if girls like to put it on, or if that's definitely in my job description. I don't know if we're supposed to be under the covers or on top of them; I don't know if I get rid of the condom right away, or if that will ruin the post-sex snuggling that girls are supposed to appreciate. I don't know if I should go all caveman and just drag her up to my room and throw her on the bed the minute she gets here, or if I should have the mac and cheese in the oven and a nice dinner table set up so that she feels romanced, or whatever. Do I brush my teeth right before she gets here, or is that too obvious? Should I shower before, or will I want to shower after? Will she want to shower _with _me after, and how does that work? Can you wear a condom in the shower, or will it slip off? Would she even _want_ to do it twice in one night, and if she does, will I be able to?

In short, I don't know shit.

And Bella will be here in two hours.

_Oh, God._

I make my way up to my bedroom and start with the obvious: I should make my bed. Or…wait, _should_ I make my bed? Will that just make it more complicated to get under the covers later if, in fact, she wants to get under the covers? No. I should definitely make my bed, if only because otherwise it looks like I couldn't be bothered, and that just seems…rude.

Okay. So. Make the bed.

I straighten the pillows and drag the crumpled sheet up from the foot of the bed, folding it back like I've seen my mom do and then tucking the sides beneath the mattress. I pull the comforter up and over the pillows and then smooth my hand over the top of it.

Not bad.

Otherwise, my room is neater than usual, thanks to my mother's insistence on a top-to-bottom house cleaning before Rosalie arrived. As if she hadn't grown up just down the hall from my disaster of a bedroom, but whatever. There are no wrappers or empty soda bottles on the floor, the few pieces of laundry are actually in the hamper in my closet, and my school books are all in my backpack on my desk chair. All in all, pretty impressive. I open the drawer to my nightstand and am immediately struck by another question to which I have no answer: do I open the condom box now, so that I don't have to stop what we're doing to mess with it? Or will that look shady somehow, if it's already opened? No, I should definitely open it.

Right?

Right.

I rip the box open carefully and peek inside; it hadn't occurred to me that they would come with instructions. Unfortunately, they're printed on the inside of the box itself, and in order to read them, I have to actually tear the box apart. I hesitate only briefly before doing so and unfolding it, feeling an embarrassed flush work through my neck and face even though I'm in the complete solitude of my own bedroom. I scan the directions and the diagrams – not only is there a picture of how to put it on, but there's an actual picture of the _girl_-parts as it's about to go in – and I feel an all-too-familiar stirring in my shorts.

_Fucking hell_.

Well, maybe this is a sign I should take care of things again beforehand. Can't be too prepared, right? Right.

* * *

A full minute. It took a full minute this time, and that's certainly a step up from thirty-seven seconds. I wouldn't go so far as to pretend I'm Don Juan, but given the arc of things, it seems like I'm guaranteed at least a minute and a half once I'm inside Bella, and maybe that's long enough to at least not want to shrivel up and die from embarrassment. That's almost respectable, right? I mean, I'm not expecting an hour-long session of porn-worthy screwing, but it'd be nice for her to at least think, _"That was pleasant,"_ when all is said and done. And besides, ninety seconds can feel like a long time. Have you ever tried to hold your breath for ninety seconds? Do a handstand? Plank?

Okay, yeah, this might not be the best. I'm already trying to justify my apparent lack of staying power, and Bella's not even here yet.

_I'm such a loser. _

As if to emphasize that rather obvious point, my cell phone rings, blaring the _Star Wars_ theme at me from the back pocket of my jeans. When I retrieve it, Jasper's name and number and goofy-ass face are grinning up at me.

"Hey, Jasper," I say in greeting.

"Hey. Wanna come over? I just got _Grand Theft Auto III_."

"Thanks, man. I, uh, can't, though. Bella's coming over in a bit."

"You can bring her," Jasper says. "She's not a half-bad gamer, for a chick."

"Um. Thanks. We, uh, kind of have plans, though. Maybe tomorrow?"

_If the sex isn't so awesome that we're still having it._

_Yeah, right._

"Plans?" he echoes, and I pull absently at a loose thread on the hem of my t-shirt. "Like, going to a movie plans or gettin' freaky in the Volvo plans?"

"Listen, man, I think you need to strike the phrase 'getting freaky' from your arsenal of euphemisms."

"That's a non-answer," he says.

"We're just…hanging out."

"Yeah, hangin' out without your clothes on, I'll bet." I try to remember if I was ever this unabashedly horny before Bella came into my life and I started having semi-regular orgasms, but I can't seem to remember anything before her clearly. Still, I take pity on my best friend; I've made it a point not to leave him hanging since I got together with Bella, and in turn he's been very cool when I say I can't hang out because I'm doing stuff with her. "Wait a sec," he says, bringing me back to the conversation. "Isn't your mom in Seattle tonight?"

"Um. Yeah."

"Bow-chicka-bow-WOW," he half-sings, and I roll my eyes even as I laugh.

"Shut up, man."

"Seriously, is tonight the night? Horizontal mambo? Bumpin' uglies? Buryin' the bone?"

"_Seriously_," I mimic, "we need to upgrade your inner thesaurus. No wonder you're single."

"I'm single because I'm a very discriminatin' individual with very particular tastes," he counters with his trademark drawl accented for emphasis, and I laugh.

"So if Alice Brandon came banging on your door wanting you to dip your pen in her ink, you'd turn her away?"

"'Dip my pen in her ink,' huh? I'm addin' that to the list." He doesn't confirm or deny, but he doesn't have to; ever since Alice became the only one of Bella's former friends who still makes an effort to talk to her, Jasper has been harboring a pretty serious crush. Unfortunately, he's not exactly her type.

"Okay, well, if you kids wanna come up for air or ice cream or somethin' after you're done doin' the four-legged frolic, gimme a call."

"Four-legged…you're insane."

He laughs. "Later, Romeo."

* * *

Half an hour.

Bella will be here in thirty minutes, and in probably thirty-two minutes, I won't be a virgin anymore.

She has to wait until Charlie leaves for his shift, and then she's coming over. Just as I'm preheating the oven – I think I should at least pretend that I'm not hoping she'll want to go straight to bed, even if it means we have to reheat the mac and cheese when we're done – I hear the faint sound of my ringtone once again. Casting about for my phone, I finally spy it on top of the microwave and I grab it to see Bella's name and number on the screen. A brief pang of panic shoots through me – _Oh, God, she's not coming_ – before I flip it open and force my voice to something in the neighborhood of neutral.

"Hey!"

"Hey," she replies, but says nothing else, and I frown unseeingly at the refrigerator door.

"Everything okay?"

"Yeah!" she replies quickly. "Yeah, I just, um. I was thinking…do you think you could come here?"

My frown deepens. "To pick you up?"

"No, I mean…do you think you could…come over? Could we…do it here?"

_Bella's bed._

_Bella's lavender comforter and sheets that smell like her honey-almond milk shampoo._

_Bella's pale skin against those sheets._

"Of course we can," I say immediately, but then uncertainty makes an appearance. "Your, uh, Dad's definitely gone, though, right?"

She laughs, and the knot in my chest loosens. "He's definitely gone," she confirms. "He's actually transporting a suspect to the Port Angeles police station tonight, so he won't even be back at the Forks station until the early hours of the morning."

"Okay," I say, letting loose a breath, and light laugher once again dances through the phone line.

"My dad really freaks you out, doesn't he?"

"Well, remember when I said I'd gladly go up against Mike but that I'd hate to end up in traction?"

"I do."

"Well, your dad's like Mike, but bigger and armed."

She laughs. "Get over here, Edward."

"I'm on my way."

I turn off the oven and head back upstairs to my room, where I toss a clean pair of boxers, change of clothes, toothbrush, and a strip of the condoms on the bed. Dumping all of my books out of my backpack, I stash my overnight stuff inside it and glance around the room for anything else I might need. I sort of wish I could take my September sky with me, but it occurs to me that the occasion on which I lose my virginity is one on which I probably shouldn't feel the need for a security blanket.

I slip in behind the wheel of my car, reverse out of the driveway, and head for Bella's. The sun is just dipping behind the line where earth meets sky, casting the heavens in shades of bright pink and dusty purple, and there's a line of bright orange just above the horizon. It looks, as I drive, like the world ahead of me is on fire.

* * *

"Hi," I say from her doorstep, and God, she's so fucking pretty. Jeans and bare feet and a faded t-shirt that says "Dodgeball Champion" and I'm so glad that she didn't dress up because honestly, it never occurred to me to do so.

She smiles that soft smile that I'd never seen until after I kissed her, but which has become my favorite smile I've ever seen. "Hi." Her voice is soft – everything about her is soft – and I can't believe I'm here. "Um. Sorry to switch it up on you like this, but I sort of had a thought."

"Okay." I follow Bella into the foyer of her house, where she holds out a hand to take my backpack. I shift my weight. "I, um. There are…things in here? That we might need?"

Another smile, so soft. "Oh. Right." She turns, and I follow her through the foyer and into the living room.

The first time Bella invited me over, I was nervous. I expected a bigger house, a nicer house, something that made the small, cottage-style home she'd lived in beside me look ramshackle and sad. I was pleasantly surprised when I showed up and the house was essentially the same size as the one next door to me, except that it was in better condition and had a bigger backyard. Almost everything in it was the same – same couches, same kitchen table – and Bella later confided in me that the only things her dad changed were the things her mother had picked out, which made a lot of sense. I hadn't realized it before, but I was worried that the new house would feel less Bella, less Charlie, and I was pleased beyond belief to find that I'd been wrong. To find that I felt like I belonged there.

She leads me through the living room and past the stairs – _guess we're not getting right down to business_ – and toward the sliding glass door that leads out to her back deck. Peeking quickly over her shoulder at me – _God, she's so sexy_ – she flips the latch-lock on the door and slides it open, leading the way out onto the back deck. I slide the door closed behind me and follow her to where she's standing by the deck railing. I glance at her profile before looking out at the yard; when I do, my breath catches in my throat.

Because there, beneath the oak tree from which I've now hung upside down more times than I can count with a red-cheeked, crazy-haired girl dangling right beside me, is a blanket. A couple of pillows. And wrapped around our favorite branch, looking for all the world like a row of stars, is a strand of battery-powered fairy lights. I feel something suspiciously girly and emotional welling up in my throat, and I clear it before I can bring myself to tear my eyes from the setup and look at Bella. She's peering at me closely, watching my reaction, and when my eyes meet hers, a small smile curls her mouth. "Okay?" she asks softly, then starts chewing on the inside of her lower lip, and it hits me: _she's nervous, too_.

"Better than okay," I reply, my own voice rough, and I clear my throat. I look back at the blanket, and Bella's small hand finds mine.

"Seemed…appropriate," she murmurs, and I nod.

"Definitely. It's…" A host of adjectives fly through my mind – _beautiful, breathtaking, perfect_ – but they're all too stupid to say aloud, especially through the knot in my throat. "Awesome," I finish finally, and she beams.

"Okay," she says, and a heavy exhale falls from her lips. "Okay," she says again, quieter this time, and I squeeze her fingers between mine. Keeping hold of my hand, she leads me down the deck steps and across the grass; as we approach, I can see that the blanket is actually two – a top and a bottom – and I realize she's recreated her bed out here, beneath our tree, and _God, I love this girl_. There's also a small basket of food and two bottles of water, and when I peek over at her, she's already looking at me, gauging my reaction. "I, um. Wasn't sure if you'd have eaten already."

I shake my head. "I was going to heat up baked mac," I say. "But I didn't know if you want to eat…uh…before or…after." _Jesus, why is this so awkward? This is a sure thing; it's not like we don't know exactly what tonight is. Or is it just me? Am I the only one who feels awkward? Because that…seems entirely possible._

A nervous laugh falls into the space between us, and the confirmation is there. _Nope. Not just me. Okay, then._

"Are you hungry?" she asks, and I shake my head. "Okay," she says, sounding mildly relieved. "Me neither." But we're still standing on the edge of the blanket, fairy lights twinkling down from above us, and okay, someone should write a manual for this shit, because there are a whole hell of a lot of steps between "Hi" and rolling around naked together, and I don't have a fucking clue how to navigate them. Now is a prime example: how do I get us from standing upright to lying down without looking like all I want is to get her naked? I can't very well just drag her down beside me and…oh. She's kicking off her shoes. Okay. Yeah. That seems like a good place to start.

I step on the back of my right shoe with my left toe and kick it off before doing the same in reverse; as I shuck my socks, Bella tiptoes across the makeshift pallet to settle in front of one of the pillows. Looking up at me, she pats the space beside her, and once I'm settled, I notice a small plastic bag beside the food basket with what looks like a hand towel in it. "What's that?" I ask, pointing, and she glances over before flushing.

"A, um, damp towel. For…you know. Clean-up."

"Oh," I say, wishing I hadn't asked. But the fact that she thought of that drives home the same point that hasn't been far from my mind all day: _she's done this before, and you haven't._

"Are you nervous?" she asks, reaching out and tangling our fingers together atop her purple comforter.

"Sort of," I admit, looking down at her hand to avoid her beautiful Bella-eyes.

"About what?"

"Sucking," I say simply, and she laughs. I remember Rosalie's advice, that being honest with Bella might be the best thing, and I make a mental note to thank her somewhere down the road.

"Can I tell you a secret?"

"Yeah."

"You can't suck at it. I love you too much not to love whatever we do together, so there's no possible way that it can suck." I look up, and with the hand not holding mine, she's fiddling with the hem of her t-shirt. "But if it helps, I'm nervous, too."

I feel my eyebrows hitch. "Why?"

"Because this is your first time. That's…a lot of pressure for me, you know."

Honestly, I hadn't thought about that. Still, I think she's missing a pretty key point. "Listen, Bella, let me tell you something: this is pretty much guaranteed to be awesome for me. That's sort of…a given."

She giggles. "Well, in a sense, I guess."

"No, seriously. There is no way I'm not going to be psyched about this. You're the one who…"

_Probably won't come._

_Has definitely had better._

I can't think of anything I'm willing to say out loud, but this girl I love, who's known me since I had my milk teeth, hears what I don't say and puts a gentle hand on my jaw. "I wish it was my first time, too." She sounds really, _really_ sad, and the last thing I want her to be tonight is sad. Unsatisfied will be bad enough.

"Hey," I say gently, and she peers up at me, regret a torrent in those brown eyes I'd recognize anywhere. "Okay, listen. I'm not going to lie: there's a huge part of me that would be pumped if you'd never slept with Mike. But if you hadn't, you wouldn't have been in the pharmacy that night, and I might not be here, with you, now. And I don't know if it was worth it for you, but that makes it more than worth it for me." Suddenly those eyes are filled with tears, and I'm backtracking. "Okay, shit. I don't know what I said, but I'm sorry. I didn't mean it. I mean, I did, but I didn't. Just…don't listen to me. I'm a seventeen-year-old virgin who's spent most of the day picturing you naked, so my brain has been deprived of its normal blood flow." She giggles through her tears, and relief edges out the panic when I realize that they're girly-happy-emotional tears, not girly-sad-hurt tears. "And I'm glad I don't have to hurt you," I add, reaching up and gently pulling her hand from my face, lacing our fingers back together. "I may not be able to…make it good, but I'm really glad it won't have to be…like that."

"It _will_ be good," she says softly, and then suddenly she's up on her knees, kissing me. I'm glad we didn't eat anything, because the lip gloss or lip balm or whatever she's wearing tastes sort of like cherries and faintly like the Popsicles she's so fond of, and it grounds me in a way I've been grasping for all day. "I love you," she murmurs, and I say it back before she smiles and pulls her t-shirt over her head.

_Holy shit._

Okay, I mean, I've seen Bella's tits quite a few times now, but it's never _not_ awesome when a girl whips off her top in front of you. She reaches out and pinches the hem of my t-shirt between her thumb and forefinger, and I take her cue to drag it up and off, and I'll never understand the way Bella looks at me when I'm shirtless. I'm skinny and pale and gangly and basically have the body of a computer nerd from one of the rainiest places in the continental U.S., and yet she looks at me like I have the body of…well, her football-player ex. But I can't worry about it too much because Bella's boobs are almost visible through the thin white cotton of her bra, and I'm trying desperately not to enjoy it so much that this party is over before it starts. And I know that there are about a million different kinds of bras with colors and lace and padding and shit, but there's something about Bella's little scraps of white cotton that make me feel like I did that night when I hammered a Chipwich and two bottles of Dr. Pepper in about twenty minutes: like my spine is humming and something in my head or chest might explode. She's watching me watch her, a small, wry smile tugging at her mouth, and she rises onto her knees again and curls two fingers into the waistband of my jeans. "C'mere," she murmurs and slides the button free. "Okay?" she asks, peering up at me, and I can only nod as she slides the zipper down and pushes the waistband off my hips so that denim pools around my knees. "Sit," she whispers, and I do as instructed, letting her drag my jeans the rest of the way off my legs. As she tosses my pants into the grass, she stands and undoes the button and zipper of her own jeans; when she moves to slide them off her hips, I reach up and grab the waistband, gently drawing them down her legs. When they reach her ankles, she places a hand on my shoulder as I help her step out of them and toss them over to land atop mine. I look up at her, and she's in the foreground with our make-believe galaxy twinkling above her, the silhouette of solid oak branches disappearing into a steadily darkening sky, and she's beautiful beyond measure. And I don't care what happens next, if I last thirty seconds or all night long, I will never, _never_, for as long as I live, forget this girl in this moment.

And then she takes off her bra, and all I can see is _Bella._ Bare-chested, bare-stomached, bare-shouldered Bella, standing beneath a September sky in a scrap of white cotton, gazing down at me like I'm worth it. Off her cue, I reach up and slide her white cotton panties down her legs and off her ankles, and she lowers herself to her knees to help me out of my boxers.

I can feel the cool twilight air on every inch of my skin, and I'm so hard that thirty-seven seconds might be a pipe dream. We drag her lavender comforter up and over us, and we're naked in this tiny cocoon that's warm with the body heat we're throwing off. Bella nudges closer, and I can feel the silk-slide of her soft skin against every inch of me, and I've never felt _so much_ of her as I can right now. "Are you sure?" she breathes, and a rough half-laugh bubbles up in my throat.

"Isn't that supposed to be the guy's line?" But it isn't an answer either way, and Bella is a smart girl.

"Edward."

"I'm sure."

She tilts her head and kisses me, draping her leg over my hips, and she's right there – _right there_ – but I don't have a condom on yet and I don't know how I'd get inside her from this angle and – oh, she's touching me. Whisper-soft strokes up and down, and I push into her hand once, twice before arching my hips away, desperately close to coming already. "Wait," I almost-gasp, and her hand slides to my hip. "Wait," I say again, even though she stopped the first time, and I try to slow my hammering heart, my pounding pulse, my gasping breaths. I swallow, and I can taste her kisses on my tongue, and I feel like I'm drowning in her. Her smell, her taste, her feel, her voice. _Bella_.

"Hey," she murmurs, and I realize that I've had my eyes closed for a while, my forehead pressed to hers, so I pull back to meet her gaze. Her kiss-pink lips curl into a small smile, and she drags a ghost of a touch up my side and back down to my hip.

"Sorry," I whisper under her concerned gaze and her purple blanket and her makeshift swirl of stars.

"Too much?" she whispers, and I drop my gaze to her mouth as I nod.

"Just…a little."

"Okay." She cranes her neck to kiss me, gentle and sweet, before pulling back. "Want to get one?"

I'm opening my mouth to say, "_One what?_" when my brain starts working again, and I remember the strip of condoms in the front zipper of my backpack. "Yeah," I breathe, kissing her once more before rolling away, onto my other side and reaching for my bag. The blankets shift and suddenly Bella is pressed up against my back, her hands roaming all over my chest and her tiny chin pressing into my shoulder as she watches my hands. She presses tiny kisses to my shoulder blade as I rip one of the foil packets off and search for the spot to open it; as I tear the wrapper and pull it out, her chin returns to my shoulder, and I realize that she's going to watch me put it on. Willing my hands not to shake, I sheathe myself and turn; she returns to her pillow, sliding back down and smiling up at me.

I've seen Bella naked a number of times now, but I've never seen her on her back beneath me, bare and legs spread and waiting, and I feel as though I'm melting into a puddle of want and need and love and desperation as I lower myself into the cradle of her hips. My hands are pressing into the blanket on either side of her head, and I'm just about to move one down to guide myself when I feel her hand wrap around me and – _oh, God_ – she's pulling me to the heart of her.

Then I'm pushing in, and she's warm and soft and wet and perfect and hot and beautiful and everything and…_oh, shit_. "Bella," I gasp out as my body tenses, hips flush against hers, and she runs her hands over my spine, and I pull and push and feel like she's touching me _everywhere._

"It's okay," she breathes, and I'm coming, and nothing else matters.

* * *

Bella sits up and reaches up to the edge of the blanket, retrieving the damp hand towel from the bag on the grass, and as she pulls it out and hands it to me, I'm struck by the most embarrassing of realizations: _the washcloth is still warm._ It didn't even have time to get cold, which I should be thankful for, since I'm using it to clean the most sensitive part of me, but I'm too ashamed to feel anything but humiliated. I didn't last thirty-seven seconds at all; I barely lasted seven. "I'm sorry," I say as I sit up, too mortified to meet her eye, balling the cloth up when I'm done with it and dropping it into the grass. "Jesus, Bella, I'm sorry."

"Hey," she says, voice sharp, and I look up. "Don't."

"But that was—"

"Perfect," she cuts me off, scooting into my side and pressing kisses all over my face. "That was perfect." She pulls away, insecurity pulling her beautiful face into a frown. "Was it…okay for you, though?"

I bark out a sardonic laugh. "Seriously? I lasted all of…what, five seconds? I think it's clear it was more than okay for me."

"It was more than okay for me, too," she whispers, burying her face in the curve of my neck, pressing a soft, open-mouthed kiss to the dip of my clavicle.

"But—"

"Don't, Edward. Please. Don't ruin it." I open my mouth to argue – that I already ruined it, that it was a disaster, that I promise it'll be better next time – but I'm afraid of doing exactly what she just said, so I close it again. "I love you so much," she says into my skin, and a small shiver works its way up my spine.

"God, I love you, too," I whisper, closing my eyes to the feel of her kiss.

"Thank you," she breathes, and my eyes open, gazing unseeingly at the back of her house.

"For what?"

"For…doing that with me. For letting me be the one."

"You've always been the one," I murmur, and the truth of those words settles in my chest, heavy and featherlight at the same time. She pulls back to look at me, and I can see it in her face: she wishes she could say the same, but we both know that there were years in there where it just wasn't true.

"You'll always _be_ the one," she replies softly, and in an instant I learn what she's inadvertently teaching me: that a promise of a future is such a better gift that a history of a past. I wrap my arm around her waist, my fingertips finding her bare hip, and pull her even tighter into my side. We lie back against the pillows, gazing up at Bella's tiny galaxy, and while my heart was pounding just moments ago, now it beats slow and steady but full to bursting.

"That sort of looks like Reticulum," I say, pointing to a small trapezoidal cluster of light-stars near the point where the branch meets the trunk of the tree.

"Really?" she asks, squinting to where I'm indicating.

"Yeah. See the sort of diamond-like shape?"

"Yeah."

I nod against her soft pillow. "But it's best visible in the January sky."

"Hm." We're quiet for a few minutes, me trying to see if there are any other constellation-like patterns in Bella's string of stars and Bella thinking the God-knows-what that girls think about after truly mediocre virginity-losing sex. "You know, if I put the winter sky on my bedroom ceiling, then we could see whatever constellation we wanted to whenever we wanted it."

There are so many unspoken implications in that sentence that I can't pick my favorite: that she likes my geektastic bedroom décor, that there are endless nights in each other's beds stretching out ahead of us. That she's willing to be the half of the sky I can't see, the winter stars to my summer. I want to say a million things that a seventeen-year-old high school senior has no business saying – _Marry me,_ _Don't ever leave me, Be mine forever_ – but I manage to hold my tongue. I can understand, suddenly, how a guy might blurt out an "I love you" in the immediate aftermath of good sex. "That'd be cool," I say instead, and Bella presses herself tighter against my side.

"What's your favorite?" she asks, tracing indistinct patterns on the bare skin of my stomach that could be a whole new map of constellations in its own right.

"In the summer sky?" I ask, and I feel her shrug against my ribs.

"Whichever."

"Aquila," I say immediately.

"Isn't that one that you have on your ceiling?"

"Yeah."

She scrunches up her adorable, barely-freckled nose. "The eagle?"

I'm impressed that she remembers. "Yeah."

"How come?"

I blow out a breath, knowing that despite being naked, I'm about to bare another piece of me, and not just my considerable geekiness. "Come here," I say, nudging her to sitting and wrapping us both in her purple comforter; we stand and shuffle-walk to the edge of the blanket so that we can see the canopy of stars twinkling down at us from the just-about-dark sky. It's barely visible this early, but it's there. I point, and she follows my finger before nodding. "Aquila actually contains two major novae – what the ancients called 'new stars,'" I say. "But really, a nova isn't a new star at all. It's actually a really old one that suddenly becomes bright again." Through the warm skin of her back, I can feel her heart thumping faintly, and I have no doubt she can feel mine thrumming against her spine. "It's like it regains the brilliance of its youth."

She's quiet for a few minutes, staring up at the starry firmament, and I can just see the tips of her dark eyelashes, the slope of her nose. "That's my new favorite," she whispers finally, turning and wrapping her arms around my waist inside our warm cocoon. I bring my hand not holding the blanket closed up the line of her spine, dragging my fingernails gently across the soft planes of her skin.

"It's mine, too," I murmur, staring at the constellation and all of the comparatively dull stars around it.

Suddenly, Bella tilts her head back and props her chin on my chest. "You didn't tell me that story when I asked about the stars on your ceiling," she says, brown eyes glowing soft in the moonlight.

"No," I say, still peering at the heavens, and glow-in-the-dark plastic is a pretty sad substitute.

"I'm not going anywhere, Edward." Her voice is so, so soft, and when I look at her, she looks hopeful and wistful and earnest.

"I know," I say, and I do. I finally, wholly, do.

I feel her skin pebble beneath my fingertips as the faintest of shivers tremble through her small frame, and I press a kiss to the top of her head. "Getting cold?"

"A little, but I really don't want to go in."

I know what she means, but there's a definite bite in the air and my toes are starting to get cold. And I've been imagining sleeping – _actually _sleeping – with her for weeks. Curling my body around hers, breathing in the soft-sweet smell of her hair all night, seeing what she looks like in the morning: if her hair gets even crazier and if she gets pillow-creases in her cheeks. Plus, I'm starting to get hungry. "What's in the picnic basket?"

And, despite everything, _now_ she blushes. "Strawberries and Ritz crackers." I crack up and she nudges me with her elbow. "Shut up. I told you this was sort of a last-minute idea; I had to raid the fridge, and unless you wanted half a salami or a jar of mustard, strawberries were as good as it was going to get."

I'm still chuckling. "And the crackers?"

She shrugs. "The only thing in the pantry that wasn't already open and therefore possibly stale." I'm still laughing as I press a kiss to her mouth.

Once we're back in our clothes, I unwind the string of lights from the tree branch and drop them into the basket. Bella grabs it and I shrug into my backpack before bundling up the pillows and blankets in my arms. "I can help with that, you know," she says, laughing as I nearly trip over one of the corners of her purple comforter that's dragging on the ground.

"Just…don't let me trip up the stairs," I say, voice muffled by her bedclothes.

She leads me across the yard, up the stairs, and into the house, and I carry her bedding upstairs and into her room, dumping it all in a heap atop her mattress. "Yeah, um, I should probably remake my bed," she says from behind me. "Charlie would probably wonder why all my blankets were off, otherwise."

"Okay," I say, helping her put her bed to rights, and just as she's smoothing over her quilt, I reflexively glance up at her ceiling. There, directly above her pillows, is a single star. Not a glow-in-the-dark one, but one of those little silver metallic star stickers that teachers used to put on our worksheets back in elementary school. "What's that?" I ask, and when she follows my gaze, she blushes.

"Just…a placeholder." She's still smoothing her bedding, even though all of the wrinkles are gone.

"Placeholder?"

Finally, she straightens. "If I put the winter sky up there, that's where I want Polaris."

Bella's not much for astronomy outside of our ruminations over my bedroom décor, and I can feel the surprise in my expression when I look at her. "Why Polaris?"

"It's a navigational star," she says softly. "And it never goes away. Summer, winter, it's always there." I nod as I glance back up, thinking that, if I somehow get to keep Bella forever, I'll tattoo that star right in the middle of my chest, right over my heart, so that she always knows where she belongs. I'm still staring up at that tiny flash of silver when she rounds the bed and presses a kiss to my throat.

This time, I do what I'm supposed to: I kiss her everywhere, touch her everywhere, feather-soft and vise-tight, until she's splintering and shattering and curling up into me, gasping and loose-limbed and breathless. And when I slide into her, it's still warm and wet and hot and everything else it was before, and it's still-new and not-new at the same time, and I last just long enough to feel at least a little bit redeemed before I pour everything I am, everything I have, into her. And it's perfect and awesome and beautiful and every other adjective I wouldn't necessarily say aloud.

And yet.

As embarrassing as it was, as hair-trigger as it was, nothing will ever compare to that first time, those seven seconds beneath a September sky and a canopy of oak branches and Bella's handful of stars that she strung up just for me.


End file.
